As everyone who isn’t living under a rock in backwoods Arkansas knows, there was a shooting at Virginia Tech that left 33 people dead. And the world came to a standstill. Instead of the latest world news, we get to hear interviews with alumni of the school, trying to make that one professor they had seem special, even if there was nothing particularly remarkable about them in their memory. We get told over and over again what a tragedy it is and how brave the ‘survivors’ are.

If there is one thing this country loves more than oil, it’s grief. We don’t just want to know how many people were killed and why, we want to know what every last one of the victims had wanted for their futures, what their favorite type of dog was, and of course, their signs. All so we can stand around our water coolers for the next four months and talk about how tragic it all is.

The U.N. reports that 34,000 Iraqi CIVILIANS were killed in Iraq in 2006 (just over 93/day). Not to mention inocent civilians in wars all around the world. Let alone those innocent civilians who die of things we can prevent, like starvation.

The death of 33 people is indeed sad. But it doesn’t fucking matter. It matters to the people close to those who have died, to those affected by the event – but when I go to work tomorrow I don’t want to hear how sad you think it is. This event doesn’t say anything about the state of the Nation’s college students – it doesn’t mean that we need metal detector at all school entrances, and it certainly doesn’t mean that South Koreans are evil.

While all of the news channels are bringing us the up-to-the-minute reports on what color teddy bear was loved by one of the victims, I’ll go online and try to find about the 35,000 children that die EVERY DAY of starvation, and find out why we let that happen.

The News should be the facts, the necessaries. Who, what, where, when, why, how. Beyond that is exploitation plain and simple. Beyond that is fox news. Dear god, I just want to hear the news. . .

So I just saw a clip of Bill Mahr doing his ‘New Rules’. He points out that the 33 year old lawyer who just resigned from the White House because of the latest Bush scandal got her degree from Pat Robertson’s law school. According to Mahr, there are 150 officials in the Bush administration who have received degrees from this less than prestigious school.

Regent University highlighted that at least 150 graduates have served in the George W. Bush administration, as noted on their “Quick Facts” page.[14] The Regent Law school garnered unwanted attention in 2007, when Monica Goodling, a Regent graduate, invoked her fifth amendment rights to avoid testifying about White House involvement in the U.S. attorneys controversy.[2] Before 2001, it was rare for Regent’s graduates to get government jobs. However, the Bush administration’s appointment of the dean of Regent’s government school, Kay Coles James, as director of the Office of Personnel Management caused the “the doors of opportunity for government jobs [to be] thrown open to Regent alumni.”[2] Regent was a lower-ranked school than the typical alma mater of DOJ employees, and its graduates tended to have less experience in civil rights law. [2]

Should you be able to work for the government if your highest degree was awarded from a religious institute? Should the school have even gotten its accredidation?

Homer’s Iliad remains one of my favorite books. In my experience if people didn’t like it, it was because they found that they had a hard time caring. Perhaps the 3000 years that have gone by since it was written present too great of a literary hurdle for some modern readers.

In any case, here’s a scan of the cover of an actual, published translation – that found a clever way to bridge that gap.

Hereyou can watch a video of Bill O’Reilly and Geraldo Rivera going at it. I like to watch Bill loose his cool because I’m hoping one day he’ll just explode.

They’re arguing about a DUI case involving an illegal immigrant. Geraldo actually has a good point, which is that there is no cause and effect relationship between him being an illegal immigrant and him being a drunk. Bill seems to take particular offense to this idea.

The United States finds itself, once again, in an awkward position. After a major fuck-up in Iraq we have put ourselves in the position of not being able to effectively combat the destructive forces in the country. If we pull our troops out, who knows what will happen, it would probably get worse before it got better. We are running short on the funds and manpower necessary to continue our inadequate occupation. What to do?

Apologize and ask for help. With the full involvement of the international community, we could potentially end the war without fucking it up anymore than we already have. We simply can not go to the international community and ask them to help us out, after we ignored them and invaded the country unilaterally. The apology is an important part of this. The president, and every other politician needs to come out and publicly say,

“Hey, we fucked up – and we’re extremely sorry. This is what we’re doing to make sure this won’t happen again, and we are happy to count ourselves as a part of the international community and not above it. This being said, we have put the Iraqi people in a horrible situation. We’re trying to fix it, but THEY need your help. We understand the sentiment of ‘you break it you buy it’ – but what you also need to understand is that we are unable to fix it – and that standing by and watching the country fall into civil war is not acceptable. We are willing to accept the blame, and we expect to pay for it for a long time – but we must not forget that their are innocent Iraqis suffering.”

Or something to that affect. We need to yield control to the international community, or else we will surely fail.

A new Newsweek poll says that 91% of Americans believe in (a) God, while only 3% of Americans identify as atheists.

82% of believers identified as Christian. From the poll:

Nearly half (48 percent) of the public rejects the scientific theory of evolution; one-third (34 percent) of college graduates say they accept the Biblical account of creation as fact. Seventy-three percent of Evangelical Protestants say they believe that God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years; 39 percent of non-Evangelical Protestants and 41 percent of Catholics agree with that view.

Would you like some Americans with your ignorance?

Granted, I have no idea how Newsweek went about gathering these numbers. What it may actually tell us is that 91% of Newsweek readers who would bother to respond to a poll believe in God.